After decades of relative decrepitude, the very
salient electricity crisis in sub-Sahara Africa has led to the formulation of a
range of polices for the scale up in renewable energy applications. Most of
these policies have been formed on politicians’ prescription of goals and
priorities, resulting in multiple incoherent policy and institutional
structures with conflicting goals and legal mandates. Consequently, with weak legislative
and statutory measures, the regulatory environment remains increasingly
fragmented. Whilst the motive behind policy formation could be implied, it
remains unclear if lessons have been drawn from the successes and failures of
these mechanisms in different countries? This question leads us to an
interesting hypothetical dialogue in the RE discipline: transferability of
policy lessons. Existing literature on RE policy contains a marginal account of
policy transfer and lacks any focused reference to the conditions under which
one country’s successful policy might be more or less successfully transferable
in another. This underlines the need to carefully review RE policies and
analyse how transferable lessons have been identified and transferred to found
enabling policy framework. Therefore, my research seeks to understand the
conditions under which RE policy ideas travel into Nigeria and selected
countries. I examine the formation and coordination of RE policies in Kenya, Nigeria
and South Africa to determine which causal mechanisms lead to the replication
of policy outcomes similar to the jurisdiction of policy origin.